Saturday July 7th 2007 20.46
siu shu Slight Heat
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Solar fortnight beginning:
Saturday July 7th 2007 20.46
Hour Day Month Year
fire water fire fire
bing ren ding ding
xu yin wei hai
dog tiger goat pig
Month: ding wei the fire Goat
Solar Fortnight: siu shu Slight Heat
Celebrate Good News Right On
I spend so much time answering cries for help, I am keen to celebrate as upset turns to triumph. When we celebrate we anchor the good news where we can draw on it again in harder times.
Hence good news first: Maria got the job in Scotland. You’ll remember her from the last diary – she was the one with the M1 in her back garden and the Sicilian Australian parents. My children are used to their Dad being a wuss, so my dewy eyes when I get her email are not cause for special attention.
“Daddy’s crying” says Jessie who is nineteen.
“Again,” says Joey who is a 12-year-old boy and therefore hardened.
Maria’s dream job is in the North West just as her ba zi suggested. Now she can find a new place, armed with an appreciation of exactly what good feng shui isn’t. Or better still call me in. I have to be in Edinburgh to look at a new house for Becky some time soon anyway.
We have worked so hard on this, Maria and myself, her ba zi and the rotten feng shui of her rented place and she has been so brave and so trusting. I am so grateful to God, Spirit, Goddess,Tao, Higher Mind and all at HQ.
Slight Heat
Slight dry more like it. The stems and branches of last month indicated a wet one and so it was. What about this month? The Met Office theaten more of the same but then they failed to predict the deluge and they hate us to have unauthorised weather.
The stems ren (yang water) and ding (yin fire) above, together make wood which implies sun and rain compromising on a drier time especially in the first and third weeks of July. And it is indeed an hour or two since I was caught in a shower.
Down in Hereford Paul has been waiting a month for his swimming pool to go in. He tells me it’s like the (Battle of ) the Somme down there; I tell him to keep his head down and wait for the Armistice. I was with him fixing its position last month: marking first exactly how the water got to the pool, then how it was to exit and finally where it will stand. Everything else, rear Mountain, Dragon and Tiger hills to either side, chi mouth at the two main doors are in readiness. His family, Stanley the dog, the horses, the ducks, the garden, the house and above all Paul himself wait for the pattern of chi to click into place.
With his life stalling, Paul called me in three years ago. His Big Fate derived from his ba zi, showed that he would come out of the spin in July 2007 and here we are.
“Should I put in a swimming pool?” he asked me then, to which the answer on this topographically sound estate that lacked a border of water, was clearly yes. As to where, we consulted GrandMaster Yang’s mediaeval Double Mountain Upwards formula as well as the Water Dragon Classic. The original prescribed location was in the SouthEastern location of the Snake which was fine in 2005 and 2006 but by 2007 violated the tai sui (that is offended the Pig ruling the year). We have been waiting for his fortunes to change for three years. And now the recent monsoon puts it back again.
I remember Richard Creightmore describing building the Beech Hill stone circle in Sussex in the 90’s: how the underground water changed course as the vast stones creaked into place. So my luo pan (or Chinese compass) twitched and stuck as we marked Paul’s pool out. We all hold our breath.
Richard Creightmore, an Oxford graduate and an immensely bright man, talks of the complex physics of erecting several tons of stone in the same breath as he tells of the influence of a “chance encounter with a goblin at the Chalice Well in Glastonbury.” I love that. Google him and look at his website.
What else can we say about July? Growing chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan as predicted. The ruling Hexagram from the Book of Changes is Number 33, Dun Retreat. President Bush is in retreat alright but it seems mostly because they’re losing a war rather than any movement in the American conscience. I’d love to be wrong about this especially with all the anticipation concerning the world’s end in 2012.
As it happens this month actually shares stem and branch with 1967, the Summer of Love. Expect some of that flavour. Elementally it’s a fire Goat. Now is the time to do the Festivals. This month’s will be legendary: less mud, more peace and love. Be sure to wear a flower in your hair.
This frisson sadly is unlikely to last beyond August as it is followed by the stems and branches that relate to1968 and the years beyond: Altamont, Bloody Sunday, Cambodia and My Lai. Pillars repeat it seems to me, so that we may learn something. Perhaps we can. In line with the Tao, we tell the truth about what is going on and about what we want and choose love ahead of self-indulgence. This is all choice.
Lara, a Cherokee with whom I have been in correspondence, asks me about 2012. I’m not having Armageddon. I refuse to play. This is my universe (and paradoxically yours) and I want everything to be okay which involves a healthy, peaceful world for our children to grow up in. All that is, is either untrue or good; it’s as simple as that. And if you think that’s easy for me to say, as Tyra Banks says on America’s Top Model, you have no idea of my story. Or perhaps if you’ve read my book (£9.99 from all good bookstores) you do. It’s featured in Watkins Review this month btw and I’m also in Spirit and Destiny using feng shui to coax a novel out of a journalist, since we’re blowing trumpets
Compasses and Composition
There are close to ? million Poles in the UK. I find them socially responsible and hardworking and a pleasure to meet. Frankly I don’t know how the restaurant trade got by without them. It is an extraordinary fact that this tsunami of migration has taken place over less than five years with little or no tension.
In the 8 Fate (1996-2016) we expect the North East to set the agenda. During this time the power is coming down from the North East towards the SouthWest. This is the reason so many masters advise placing water in the South West. So for Poland to have disproportionate influence on the outside world whether in the British Economy or the European Parliament is with the run of play.
My son Jaime is studying for his Doctorate at Southampton University. Southampton has more Poles per head of population than anywhere outside Chicago. The ultra-right regime in Poland has assured that neither Warsaw, Posnan, Breslau nor Krakow, Lodz or Wroclaw competes. Something like 2% of the population has left since they gained EC membership in 2003. Most of them seem to be in Southampton.
There are Polish businesses everywhere: Polish delis, Polish employment agencies, Polish magazines and papers, signs in Polish everywhere.
Joey and I drive down to pick Jaime up. After five years in Krakow married to a Polish girl Jaime is bi-lingual. It is thanks to him that I know all of 27 words in Polish.
“Dzen jobre.” (Good Day) I say in greeting as we arrive at his Hall of Residence.
On the way home we stop for refreshment in Chawton, Hampshire, home of Jane Austen. At the nearby tea shop, we share cheese, onion and tomato sandwiches although our affable waitress has apparently to armwrestle the chef (if that is not too grand a job description) into going off-menu as apparently cheese-and-tomato and cheese-and-onion are both a la carte but all three together are not.
“Badly done, Emma. Badly done.”
It was here last time we visited that my daughters overheard a frightfully upmarket lady remark after I walked past her table to the loo that I was “just a little too tall for that hair.” Which reminds me of a judgement passed to my daughter-in-law Tracey on pointing out that I was indeed the z-list celebrity feng shui man, “You wouldn’t think so to look at him, would you?”
Jane Austen lived at Chawton for the last 8 years of her life. Broke after her father died, she, her mother and her sister Cassandra were bailed out by her brother Edward Knight who was the Lord of the Manor. He had accepted new name and inheritance in a single swoop when he was adopted by the childless but wealthy Knights.
I am especially interested of course because my daughter Jessie was in the Austen bio-pic Becoming Jane. I read Pride & Prejudice at 15 for A-Level and got top marks but frankly did not appreciate the humour until my wife Sheila gently illuminated me in my 30’s. Tracey still refers to her as Mrs Bennett.
Joey and Jaime have indulged me in stopping here because I have a bit of a theory.
The manuscripts of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice were largely complete by 1800. Nothing of Austen’s however was published until 1811. It was her brother Henry who talked a publisher into taking her books on. Henry was also the marketing genius who gave Elinor and Marianne and First Impressions the snappier matching titles that have come down to us and that I pastiche predictably at the head of this column.
Noticing that the ladies’ privacy was compromised by a huge South East* facing window overlooking the busy London-Winchester Road, Edward had it bricked up and replaced by one at South/SouthWest#. The filled-in dent is still visible from the road. This was in 1810.
* Soen, wind or SE2.
# ding/may double mountain
So recap: the manuscripts were in existence a decade before publication. In the year after the Austen ladies move into Chawton, a change of front window is made from the wood of industry and the spoken word to the fire of recognition. The following year the first novel is published. The lady in the office confirms this timetable for me. We have met before, a year or so ago when we discussed the suitabilty of colonials playing Jane. As a Canadian she is circumspect about the latter issue but the Keira Knightly P&P is not a great favourite here at Austen central. I liked it but then I’m just a bloke.
We seem to have shown that there is a feng shui relationship between Jane Austen’s windows and her career. Who’d have thought it?
Next day after a long day, David is driving me back to Newbury Station from their new house deep in racehorse country.
This has been David and Sally’s fourth house in eighteen months so it was a cinch that the problem would be visible in their (especially his) ba zi’s. David is an effortlessly flexible and bighearted entrepreneur but recent projects have stalled and Sally is feeling neglected. Sally’s brother had been concerned that there were two front doors and got them to call me in. The best move would have been for them to get me in briefly before they bought of course.
What do two front doors mean? Every case is different but broadly on a scale of one to ten where one is separate tastes in music and ten is separation it’s generally a three or a four, a hint that something needs looking at. Of itself it may not be the problem and as it turns out I don’t advise Sally and David lose a door but relocate one.
So we sit down before I survey and pick at the ba zis then I survey for six hours or so and then I tell both of them baldly that the problem is his first wife. Hooks still in. Not that she could continue to control him without his compliance. Hooks bite both ways. Sally must be going through agonies but she is gracious and contained. I am touched by her trust.
“I hate her,” David says.
“The opposite of love is not hate but indifference,” I say like a Christmas Cracker. “Why is she still so important to you?”
As it happens he blames her for the demise of his business some twenty years ago. The roots are deeper than that of course. Her random aggression appears to have been much like his mother’s.
“And so you keep fouling up until she admits she is bad?”
Pause. He nods reluctantly.
“Better not hold your breath waiting,” I say.
I know I am getting somewhere when he goes red-in-the face with anger. Time has taught me that an extreme reaction is usually a sign of a bullseye. And he also is gracious, contained and responsible but nonetheless 18 stone of seething rugby player is quite a proposition. We work with this for several hours: a combination of human chi (that is choice) and earth chi (that is the tricks in the landscape and the house that are feng shui repairs) are my solutions.
Finally we are driving back. David makes a shortcut down backroads to sneak into the M4 at Membury and we spy a lad hitchhiking. Got to be foreign. Nobody hitches in England any more. We pick him up. Sure enough he is Polish.
“Dzen dobry,” I show off. He beams. I ask him – in English – where he comes from.
“Wroclaw,” he says but the actual sound of it is “Vrotswaf” and he has been studying – all these Polish waiters are over-qualified – in “Woodje.” I challenge David to spell this place.
The answer, Believe it or not, is L-o-d-z. These two pronunciations are a kind of key to what it is to be Polish, I think. They explain why written Polish reads like an eye-chart. Poland tucked between Germany and Russia and buffeted by both for a thousand years is determined to be neither. So its Slavonic tongue which is actually quite close to Russian is written in Western rather than Cyrillic script. In Russian characters the pronunciation and spelling would be consistent and in Western script it is very clearly not German
The Polish bloke gets out at the services
Next day in Café Nero I check Jane Austen’s biographical details in David Nokes’ biography and notice he says that:
“Jane Austen’s genius seemed to flourish again, as if by magic, as soon as she was established in the homely village retreat of Chawton.” I ponder this while the central European barista makes my latte and buoyed with chutzpah, I thank her with two more of my twenty seven words of Polish, “Dziekuje bardzo” Unfortunately she is from Latvia and howls at me with outrage.
HIP Replacement
Inspired by David and Sally and the number of times I have sorted a house out only for a client (this means you) to buy another home for no good reason apparently other than to present themselves with fresh discomfort and me with a challenge, I have compiled a check list of what to look for in a new house. This Feng Shui Home Identification Pack will be going on the website but I can send you one meanwhile if you ask me nicely. The first half is straightforward. Then it becomes increasingly technical but it does provide a 4th alternative to disaster, trusting Destiny and paying me £87.50 for a one hour (itinerary permitting) once-over before contracts are exchanged.
My super-duper revamped website is at www.imperialfengshui.info and
my book The Feng Shui Diaries is available now from:
Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/Feng-Shui-Diaries-Richard-Ashworth/dp/1846940176/sr=8-4/qid=1166798863/ref=sr_1_4/026-3383613-4930062?ie=UTF8&s=books
Waterstones www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/displayProductDetails.do?sku=5567853)
or indeed Tescos.
Names have been changed to protect..uh..me..
Richard Ashworth